A Moment from Now
by sometime north of reality
Summary: When Naru left Japan with only vague plans to return, he and Mai both believed that she was in love with Gene. Seven years pass. As Mai grows up, she realizes some things about herself and about Naru. He finally returns and the two of them might have a second chance at love.


_**To anyone reading my other story**: I'm really sorry. Because of that story (and life - curse you, life), I have made the rule that I can't publish a story unless the rough draft is finished. I know what happens in that story and I will finish, but honestly I'm older than when I started it and my writing has changed drastically. It may be awhile before it's finished._

**_Ghost Hunt fans: _**_I'm a complete romantic and believe that Mai and Naru were meant to be together. Just not in the timeframe of the manga or anime. Here's my series addendum with a rather unambiguous ambiguous ending._

**_Disclaimer: _**_I would like to own this series and make this canon, but I haven't conquered the world yet, so I don't get everything I want. Not mine. Shamelessly quoted lots of stuff I thought was brilliant._

* * *

A Moment from Now

At sixteen, Mai Taniyama promised herself that she would not cry anymore when the doors of SPR closed to await the arrival of Madoka Mori. She had no reason to cry. She had her new family – mostly intact but for the absence of one grieving narcissist – and her job. Her powers would continue to develop even without the benefit of Gene's advice, so she might be of more use to Madoka than she had been to Naru – now known to be Oliver Davis. Her only loss was of someone who was never hers to begin with: Eugene Davis. She could be content then to smile and think of Gene over the photograph Naru had left her.

Madoka's SPR was vastly different from Naru's in some ways, mostly positive. Mai was hassled less and now treated as a valuable member of the team by their leader. As they solved new cases, Mai grew to handle more responsibility, not only as a psychic, but as a scientific investigator. They also took more politically important cases without Naru's identity to protect, but that was neither here nor there.

For the most part, however, life at Shibuya Psychic Research – the name remained unchanged in honor of a time that had passed – was much as it had always been. Ayako and Monk continued their loving rivalry and directed nothing but affection towards Mai, Masako smirked behind an elegant hand, John was quiet and sweet, and Yasuhara lied to freak people out. A lot. Mai would not want life any other way.

All of this seemed only moments ago, so why did Mai find herself grimacing whenever she made tea?

At nineteen, Mai was a very different creature than she had been when she first started out at SPR. The innocence, the joy, and the compassion all remained. They were a part of her soul and would remain through whatever she saw, did, or lost. However, the innocence now existed without the vulnerability that had defined it when Mai was younger.

Even her appearance, staring back with wide eyes in the mirror when she returned home from a case, had changed. It was nothing drastic. The skirt was similar, but longer and sleeker. Her hair was still wild and short, but it had sharp ends where there had once been fly away strands. Her shirt rested on curves that did not belong on the body of a child. Mai had grown up.

Naru had yet to return to Japan.

For the first time in years, as Mai searched the depths of her own reflected eyes, weary after coming far too close to losing the official's young daughter to a ghost, she felt the slightest stirring of anger towards her former boss. He had said he would return, and he was still gone. Why hadn't he returned? What was keeping him away?

It was only then that she began to hate Naru for the lies and the deception, for every time he said he never asked anyone to care about him, and every time he did not feel the need to answer his team's questions. They were a family! Why couldn't that narcissistic jerk understand?

Mai was prepared for the day that he returned. He wanted to be aloof? Let him be. She would call him "Dr. Davis" and serve tea in silence if he requested it. It would not be made exactly how he liked it; she wouldn't admit that his preferences were more familiar to her than those of any other illustrious stranger who walked into her office. When he complained, she would tell him, always mildly, that she would of course make it properly, now that she knew what he wanted. He need only ask. Perhaps Yasuhara-san could prepare it for him? Mai wanted to see the confusion in his eyes as his superior intellect tried to understand why he was no longer a member of his own team. It never occurred to her that she could hurt him.

Another moment slipped away and Mai changed again. This time, there was no change visible in the mirror, beyond a slightly more expensive wardrobe.

At twenty-three, Mai was an adult. She had been through college, and she was no longer a part-timer, but a full member of the SPR. She was adept at using her ESP and her skills were in high demand among those who knew to ask. All of this could be observed through a slight gentleness in her smile and a spark of confidence that had replaced the righteous indignation that once laced her voice. She was no longer simply "right"; now she also understood.

For the first time, she understood her love for Gene. When he was her age, with years of experience exceeding hers, she had believed that she would be in love with him forever. Mai still loved him. He was one of the beautiful, incredible people who made her the person she was. He would always have a prominent place in her heart. However, he would linger forever in her memory as a teenage boy. Despite his wisdom and his kind smile, he could not age and grow with her. She did not know him well enough to proclaim him the sole keeper of her heart for all time. If Naru could ask "Me . . . or Gene?" again, she would tell him that now. For the first time, Mai knew her own heart.

She took a sip of her tea with a wistful smile.

For the first time, Mai also understood Naru, as she had known him. She knew him now only through reports from Lin and Madoka, even the occasional phone call when one of them needed something and Mai was the only one in the office. Naru sounded tired. He and Mai followed each other's lives as if reading periodic updates to a manga series. Nevertheless, she understood him now.

When Mai had first been swept into the mad world by the young investigator in black, she had been in awe of him. Yes, she protested and fought him every step of the way, but when she was in trouble, she always believed he would swoop in and save her. She believed every lie he fed her about his superiority and how his mind worked differently. She didn't question his assertions not to care or cry. If she'd ever been asked about it, she honestly would have said that he wore black because it made him look cool. Teenage Mai did not understand that Naru was young, too.

He was impulsive, unable to prevent himself for rising to a challenge. There was no need for him to spend the night having a staring contest with an evil spirit and he should never have used PK to break that spoon or answered her anger to defeat the driftwood god. Two hospital trips had surprised Mai, but Naru knew where his actions would land him. His life was worth more than his pride, even to him, and if he had been more than a child, he would have realized that before his heart stopped.

Naru had an answer to anything Mai could shout at him, but he had contradictions. Their first shared secret had been when Naru hadn't wanted Lin to know about his spoon-bending. Naru had chosen to flaunt his abilities against Lin's directions, and he didn't want to be caught. At the same time, Lin was his safety-net. When he fell down the hole after Mai, he was not afraid, because he never doubted that Lin would find him. As far as childishness was concerned, that incident spoke for itself.

Twenty-three year old Mai was older than seventeen year old Naru had seemed to her at the time, and her naïveté had slipped away with her evanescent youth. She could see the flaws behind the narcissistic façade.

She could also see strengths she never would have suspected when she fancied herself in love with him. Gene was not, as Naru would claim, the twin with the good personality in contrast to Naru's own darkness. Gene may have been an angel – Mai never knew him well enough to confirm or deny it – but Naru had good qualities. The obvious ones were his intelligence and bravery, but he could be sweet as well. He was the one who brought her magic in the darkness in order to break through her fear. After her supernatural nightmare, he brought her a cup of tea, just as she had done for him countless times every day. (After a moment's reflection on this symbolism of tea, Mai could no longer resent the numerous cups she had brewed for him.) Even giving her a job as assistant, – according to Naru an attempt to recollect a debt and later the result of excessive money to spend – had been act of kindness. Looking back, Mai did not know how she would have made it through college, or even high school, without her job at SPR. Naru gave her a wonderful, impossible life.

Even his greatest vice, his narcissism, was an illusion. Naru could be extraordinarily disciplined and humble. He slipped easily into subservience when he had to play the role of Yasuhara's assistant and he never boasted of his elaborately planned successes. His most arrogant behavior was directed as a defense at outsiders or, for mischief, at Mai.

Mai had dropped the stack of files she was holding in the moment of her great epiphany. Flurries of paper crashed around her, and her coworkers assumed that she had fallen asleep. Again. Mai didn't notice as she rummaged through snapshot memories.

Naru had provoked her for fun.

Every time he said something snide, his eyes sparkled and the corner of his lips twitched up.

Every time Mai had ended up yelling "narcissistic jerk", he had been joking.

Naru was far away from home, playing the role of boss in a world of adults, risking his life and protecting those around him, and all the while searching for the corpse of the person he had been closest to. Picking on Mai was stress relief. She was the only other person his age with whom he could regularly interact. Aggravating her even became a sign of affection. It made adult-Mai laugh at the times she had tried to humanize Naru by discovering a normal hobby for him. She was his hobby.

Realization complete and the moment over, Mai had returned the scattered files to their proper places.

That unbelievably suave incident seemed only moments ago, but it had been a year. Mai had spent the last year realizing that she was still in love with Naru and trying to understand what went wrong, because Naru didn't need to say "I love you, too" for her to know that it was true.

In the end, Mai supposed that they were not ready for each other. Mai was too gullible and lacked patience.

And then there was Naru. Mr. Perfect.

The boy behind the nonchalant coolness, Mai now knew, had not been as effortlessly flawless and emotionless as he would have had everyone believe. It was obvious in their last case, as men searched the lake for Gene's body. Naru had little leadership on the case, because it was merely a distraction while he waited. At first, Mai had attributed his unwillingness to give direction to the ghosts' manipulation of the team's minds, but later, she realized that he had seemed less focused than usual all along. It morphed into desperation when he realized that they were trapped and faded into quiet doubt the moment Lin was taken. Of course, this was all supposition, but Mai knew that she had not felt the air of quiet assurance that permeated their usual cases. She felt its loss.

Even if this had not been true, the facts were stacked against the theory that Naru was as calm and collected as he pretended. Even if Mai had not seen his face drain of color and his fist clench in the moment he first beheld the lake (and she had, she unmistakably had), even if the cracks in his composure hadn't begun to show, she could do a Monk-style deduction.

Naru was an orphan. Everything about him screamed "well-loved by parents!" and he probably was, but it still meant that he had spent more of his life with his twin than with anyone else. He was telepathically linked to Gene, and, without him, whenever Naru used his powers he drained himself near the point of death. By circumstance and by necessity, Naru was closer to Gene than he could ever be to anyone.

Gene was now dead.

Naru experienced the accident and subsequent murder as if it had happened to himself, when all he had wanted to do was borrow some clothes from his brother. Any sane person would have a few screws jarred loose under those circumstances.

Even before the tragedy, though, Naru had problems, caused largely by his own powers. As a child, he caused poltergeists, and as he grew in renown, he had to deal with the letters of the grieving and desperate who believed that he could find their missing loved ones. He could. That was the problem. He could experience their deaths and be hated for crushing false hopes. He could even die himself from injuries dealt to another. He had to turn away from empathy or be consumed.

Still, that only meant that he had to present a cold image, not that he couldn't connect. Naru claimed emotional peace – "in 100 years, everyone living will be dead" – but then why wear mourning clothes? He was away from his family, living in a hotel. There was no one there to judge him. Therefore, the clothes were a mark of his own grief.

As a teenager, Mai sensed the pain, but assumed that it was her own when Naru refused to cry. Sensing rather than knowing had been her problem then. She had nothing but instinct to deflect and refute Naru's cunning logic. Animal instinct said that Naru had told the truth when he denied emotion.

At twenty-three, Mai could lie with the truth as well as anyone else, and she could explain his refusal to acknowledge that he cared. Again, an obvious truth called for logic, because Naru could not be swayed by the obvious unless it was cross-referenced and cited in a scientific journal.

Naru and Lin were powerful enough and well trained enough to work alone. They had done so before Mai came along. However, Naru hired Mai and continually called on the friends they made during their cases. That spoke less of convenience and more of care. Despite these connections, he kept increasingly unnecessary secrets and refused to acknowledge friendships even as more and more was revealed about his companions.

Mai knew now what she should have known a long time ago: Naru was trying to connect and couldn't admit it to himself. He was afraid to need them.

By the same logic, having been taught to suppress emotion, he could not admit his own grief. Finally, after many dreary winter days dreaming over unopened files for work, Mai could reconcile the truth in Naru's words and the grief her own sixth sense had detected. Naru believed his lies. He had been too damaged to know that he was in pain, and Mai had been too young to see past his defenses.

No more.

Mai was ready now, as she had not been at sixteen or at nineteen. She was prepared to welcome him, not as a child or as a stranger, but as if he never left. The only differences were that she was a woman now, instead of a girl, and that she knew all of his old tricks. She was ready to play his games with a sly, amused smile to tell him that she was in on the joke. Later, she would be ready to show him that she had matured as an investigator, and finally, if she still felt for him what she had all those years before, she was ready to tell him again that she loved him. Mai would not be dissuaded this time.

She'd grown up seven years and Naru had taken his time to heal. The interlude was over. Naru had returned to Japan.

At that very moment, when Mai was rehearsing her plans in her head, he was driving to the restaurant where the reunited SPR team would meet.

Mai's eyes met her own gaze reflected in the mirror as she looked over her appearance before leaving. She grinned back at herself. The long waiting moments were over. It was time.

A moment from now, she would sashay down the hallway of her apartment and casually flick off the lights as she left for the restaurant. When she first saw Naru – and she would see him before he saw her, because she was late again – she would hug him impulsively. He would make a dry comment to cover being flustered and she would shriek "You narcissistic jerk!" Only this time, her eyes would have the same gleam of amusement that his used to. He would notice – he always noticed her – and she would smile just for him as she slipped into the seat on his left, pushing Masako out of the way as always.

After dinner, all of SPR would depart together, en route for their first case as a complete team. Mai would let herself be shunted off to the back seat of whatever car the others wanted her in. It didn't matter. When the case was over or it was time to leave for the night, she would catch Naru's arm before he went his own way. With one arm intertwined with his and her other hand resting on his shoulder, she would whisper in his ear.

"Welcome home. Please stay."

Her voice would be silk like Madoka's and, if her life was a manga, there would be hearts around the text.

Naru would freeze in surprise and this time, Mai would not make the mistake of forcing him to reply. She would call out "goodnight" as she walked alone to the car. This was only one moment in time, an early one at that.

They would continue to solve the case as if Mai had never said a word, but there would be another moment. He would say that he had no immediate plans for departure and add a dig at her concern with his plans. Poor needy Mai. Then he would smile that impish smile, and Mai would hear the words he wasn't ready to say yet.

More moments would pass, until finally they would reach the moment when Naru was ready.

"I love you."

It was Naru, so the moment would be perfectly timed for maximum dramatic impact, but it would be beautiful nonetheless. That moment would lead into another, when the light from the rising moon of a warm evening would reflect off of an engagement ring and Mai would say "yes". Moments later Luella and the SPR family would be sobbing in the audience as Mai and Naru said their vows. Even Lin and Martin might be caught sniffling a bit.

All of these moments would spiral off into an infinity of moments, and all of them would belong to Naru and Mai, together. All of these moments lived on the misty horizon of may-soon-be, but the sun was beginning to rise and they were coming into focus.

Now, Mai grinned at her carefully crafted reflection and sashayed down the hallway of her apartment. She paused for a moment as she stood, framed in the open doorway. Then, with a smile, she crossed the threshold and flicked off the lights.

* * *

_**A/N**: Since this isn't manga, I don't have an extra side-panel to add a random silly story. Nevertheless, here it is. It's actually loosely based on something clever a classmate said, so it's a bit offensive. Enjoy. Obviously quoted parts are quotes, obviously._

If Mai had been more like Naru than Gene . . .

Mai: If I remember correctly, aren't you Chinese, Lin-san?

Lin: So? . . . I hate the Japanese.

Mai: I expected as much from you. All men are idiots. However, I try to judge people as individuals, so have those measurements reviewed by tomorrow. Goodnight.

(_Exits._)

Lin: . . .

* * *

_**A/N**: Fin. I hope you enjoyed it and I'm always happy to hear what you think. _


End file.
